Walter Russell Mead really hits the nail on the head, here. He explains that the four older empires, Ottoman, Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian, were, whatever their weaknesses, “multiethnic and multi confessional states.” After the fall of these empires, all these groups wanted their own states and not all this “diversity,” to use a term now fashionable in the West but not necessarily anywhere else. And Mead also outlines the strategies that Middle Eastern Christians have used:

2. Look for foreign protectors, however, these foreign protectors proved a lot less faithful as the Western nations no longer defined themselves as Christian.

3. Supporting the secular concept of “Arab Nationalism.” When I first visited the Middle East in 1963, it was this ideology of Arab Nationalism, not any form of Islamism, that was opposed to Israel. But after Islamism arose,